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PAINTING
Ioannis Lassithiotakis
Creations
"...days on earth"
... The quest here is for purity of form. As abstractive elements I used the intensity of light and shade. I am not expressing myself through a play with complementary colours, using instead the chromatic qualities of black which in turn generates a different relation with colour, less loud and more mystical.
... While the painting has realistic features, there comes a blue to embrace the background, take with it one of the figures and automatically turn this into a transcendental work. The human figures, all facing in the same direction, shift the event outside the painting. I am thinking of the painting of Vermeer. As a woman reads a letter before the window we don't know what she is reading or what went on before or after that 'snapshot'. The painter merely suggests, and leaves it to the viewer to reconstruct the tale... The infinite time of a single moment, and its limitless ambiguity.
... Aside from the quest for subjects, one of my preoccupations in recent years was to find a technique to liberate the work from any decorative elements; a technique where the point would be not to illustrate but to create a work with a minimum of means, with as few gestures as possible. Just like painters in the East, I aim for everything to be determined by the brush strokes, by the density of the paint, so that colour and drawing become one.
... It is my feeling that what these works ultimately express is my uncertainty about the future. I started by painting portraits, usually of my own people. Essentially, I started from the 'security' of my everyday environment only to come up against the insecurity caused by time, by the moment which can change everything. I believe that the theme in this series is that very moment in time after which nothing is the same again...
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